How to View Webpages When Offline in Chrome and Firefox

Almost everyone who uses the internet regularly experiences moments when their connection goes down. While this can be frustrating, you can still view these pages using Chrome or Firefox even if you are offline.

This is because both browsers have the ability to display content from their caches instead of the live version that you see on the site.

Please keep in mind that accessing these pages in this manner might change and which could render the saved webpage inaccurate. Of course, the browser cache only contains a limited number of webpages that you’ve browsed recently. This will not work on sites that have live feeds such as Netflix or Facebook.

Anyways, if you require information from a news site or from a webpage that you viewed recently, here are 2 solutions by which you can do this for each browser.

1: Chrome

Chrome is experimenting with how these webpages can be displayed. No, not the live ones but offline. That said, and for this to happen, you can start by typing “chrome://flags/#show-saved-copy” in the URL bar. After this, select Enable: Primary from the dropdown menu. You’ll find this from under the “Enable Show Saved Copy Button” heading. Once you’ve done this, then restart your browser.

Now, take your PC offline and try reading a webpage that you recently viewed. While you will see an error message from Chrome, you’ll also see a ‘Show saved copy’ button. When you click that button, you will see the version of the webpage when you were online.

2: Firefox

There’s no flag to set so as to view content offline in Firefox. Now, to view webpages from your cache, select the ‘hamburger’ icon in the upper right hand corner of Firefox. After this, select Developer>Work Offline. You’ll be able to find the webpage that you were looking for as long as it is in the browser’s cache.